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He was going to come back.
He was going to come back because he had to come back.
He was going to come back because he was her son, her flesh and blood, and this was where he belonged.
He was going to come back.
She repeated the words over and over again, the only coherent thought she managed to form in her foggy mind as she traced her fingers over his portrait woven into the tapestry.
It didn’t do him justice.
He was a beautiful boy. He always had been, ever since the day he was born. She remembered that night as if it was yesterday. It had been nearly four in the morning by the time she finally held him in her arms, and she had known then that there wasn’t anything in the world she wouldn’t do to protect her firstborn son.
He was going to come back.
They told her it had been nearly a month. She didn’t know. She didn’t know about time anymore. They had tried to get her to move at first, but she had screamed and threatened to curse them and they had finally left her alone.
The house-elf brought her food and made sure that her glass was never empty. She wasn’t hungry but she ate anyway, the house-elf coaxing her. She wasn’t thirsty but she drank anyway, because the wine helped dull the pain in her chest.
He was going to come back.
It had been nearly four weeks but she knew that he could be stubborn. He had always been stubborn, even as a small child. He had always had a flair for the dramatic too, a theatrical streak, and running off to the Potters would be exactly the thing that he would do to get her attention.
He knew perfectly well what she thought of the Potters. He had used it against her since day one and this was just the kind of attention-grabbing stunt he would pull in order to get his way. He knew which buttons to push, knew how to manipulate, knew how to play her, his father, his brother.
He was her son, after all.
He was going to come back.
She remembered being shown their family tree as a child, remembered looking at the branches that stretched and split. She had always known what her duty was, to help the tree grow further, and when she held Sirius in her arms for the first time she knew that she had succeeded. Everyone said that the moment you held your firstborn child in your arms you would feel nothing but love, but Walburga had been relieved.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t happy.
The night Sirius was born had been the happiest of her life. She had known that he was special from the first second she laid eyes on him, his black head of hair and grey eyes that had looked at her in a way that newborn babies shouldn’t be able to, as if he knew all the weight that settled on his shoulders the moment he came into the world.
He would be the one to carry on the family name and it was her job to prepare him for it. She had to make sure that he understood the responsibilities that came with being a Black, of being wizarding royalty, and it was a job that she took seriously. She knew how much he had to live up to, their ancestors, their history, and she knew how hard it would be.
His name came from his father, but Orion Black had always been a weak man. He didn’t see the world the way she did, he didn’t understand it as she did. He had always had everything handed to him on a silver plate, but that was not how she would raise her son. She would raise him right, that was the promise she had made to herself that night.
She loved him. She had loved him from the moment she saw him.
He was going to come back.
She had been a good mother. She didn’t claim to be perfect, she knew she wasn’t, but she had always done her best. He might not believe that she had, but it was the truth.
She had always wanted what was best for him, what was best for the family. She had worked so hard at keeping their family together but no-one ever thanked her for it. They all turned their back on her, punished her, all because she was the only one willing to do what it took to keep the family together.
She knew what people said about her behind her back. It wasn’t just Sirius, not only the sanctimonious Potters or the good-for-nothing faculty at Hogwarts. The wizarding world loved to gossip about her and she was used to it. She knew they called her the ice queen, accused her of ruling her family with an iron fist when everything she had ever wanted to do was to protect her family and their name.
All she had ever done was what was best for the family.
He was going to come back.
Sirius had not been an easy child. She had loved him with everything that she was and yet he was never satisfied. He was never content, not even as a baby. He cried a lot, refused to let himself be consoled by her. She would spend hours awake with him, walking through the dark rooms at Grimmauld Place, rocking him in her arms, holding him against her chest.
She had loved him.
She had loved him, but he had never loved her back. She could see that now.
He had always had a mind of his own, but before he left for school it had been within her power to make sure that he didn't stray too far in the wrong direction. She had tutored him herself. It was important, she knew that. Children with his heritage had to learn how the world worked from an early age. They needed to know not only magic, but what kind of world they were being brought up in.
She didn't want to coddle them. Nothing good came from coddling your children, her own mother had taught her that. She knew how important it was that when people looked at Sirius, they saw the whole family reflected back at them. It was important that they understood what kind of power their family possessed. It was crucial, and she tried to imprint that on both her sons, yet Sirius never seemed to care.
It didn't matter what she did, he never listened. He never sat still, he never did as he was told. He scared off their governesses, he played games instead of practising his charms, he snuck out when he was supposed to be reading his Latin and if that wasn’t enough he goaded his brother into following him.
He was ridiculously clever. Cleverer than most other children his age, she had figured that out early. His magic was strong too, as it should be with the generations of pureblood, ancient magic flowing through his veins.
His first bouts of accidental magic had come early and he was only three years old when he was strong enough to set fire to the curtains in their nursery when she took away his favourite toy. When she looked back at it, she could see it for what it was: the first time he pushed her past her limits.
The first time he pushed her far enough that something between them broke.
It all started with the dog, a ridiculous Muggle toy given to him by her good-for-nothing younger brother back when they were still on speaking terms. Sirius had loved the wretched thing, refusing to go anywhere without it, and eventually she lost her composure.
She had taken it from him, locked it away in a cupboard out of his reach, and he had thrown a tantrum. She hadn’t meant to, but at one point she couldn't take it any longer. It was just a slap, a slap to get him to be quiet and listen to her, but he had only screamed louder. She had lost her temper then, and locked him in the nursery until he calmed down.
That was when he set the curtains on fire. It was the house-elf who alerted her to it, and by the time she got the door open again the room was filled with smoke. She had found him curled up underneath his bed, his eyes the same colour as the smoke that billowed around them, watching her. He was only three years old then, but the way he had looked at her still haunted her.
He had never forgiven her for that.
His magic had become more unruly after that, bursting out of him at all moments. She knew that it technically wasn’t his fault, that he was too young, but she knew that he needed to learn how to control it.
She didn't take pleasure in punishing him, not the way that he thought she did. He didn't understand that it pained her as much as it pained him, but if he had just listened then she wouldn’t have had to be so hard on him.
She always told him that, afterwards, when he curled up in her lap and sobbed his apology into her dress. She always forgave him, of course she did, she wasn’t a monster. She only did what she had to do, and deep down inside he knew that too.
He was going to come back.
The day he’d gone to Hogwarts had been the proudest she had ever been. He had been so beautiful, standing for his portrait in front of the fireplace, dressed in his brand-new school uniform. He had looked so serious, his grey eyes staring unblinkingly into the camera as his photograph was taken. She had loved him then.
She had gone to King’s Cross to see him off. His trunk was carefully packed with everything that he could possibly need: new robes, new books, a new cauldron, new potion scales. He had looked so small and so big at the same time, and her heart had ached when she looked at him.
She didn’t want him to go, she didn’t trust Hogwarts not to ruin him. She knew how delicate he was, how important it was that he wasn’t distracted from his path, from his duty. It had been a battle that she had lost, her husband had put his foot down against home-schooling. She wasn’t happy about it, but in the end, it had been out of her hands.
“Make us proud,” she had told him before he boarded the train. I love you , she hadn’t said, and sometimes she wondered if things had been different if she had.
In the end she had been right, but she took no pleasure in that either.
Of course she’d been right, she was always right, yet no-one ever bothered to listen to what she had to say. Druella had called on her as news on the sorting reached them, all faux condolences and pretend horror but Walburga saw the way her eyes shone with badly concealed glee.
She had taken no pleasure in reminding Druella of her own failure when it came to her wayward daughter, she had simply done it to remind her of her place in the family. It wasn’t the end of the world to have their heir sorted into Gryffindor, she could work with that. She would have preferred Ravenclaw, but it was better than Hufflepuff. It wasn’t the end of the world.
So little she had known, back then.
The change had come gradually. Every time he got home from school, he was a little bit different. A little bit further away from her. There were new mannerisms thrown into the way that he moved, an arrogant tilt to his jaw when he talked back to her that hadn’t been there before, a defiant slope to his shoulders when she spoke to him. It was the Gryffindor colours that he decorated his bedroom with, the vile pictures of Muggle girls stuck to the walls with a permanent sticking charm.
He had acted out, pushed her buttons, wanting to draw a reaction out of her. She didn’t give it to him. She held herself back, did everything she could to gently steer him back on the right path. She was nothing if not patient but he was relentless.
He pushed and pushed and pushed. An incessant chafing against everything that she had taught him. He mocked everything that she held dear, everything that she had tried so hard to teach him, and nothing she did or said helped. He pushed until she couldn’t take it anymore, until she snapped and punished him, and then he blamed her for it.
She could see it in the way that he looked at her.
She knew where it came from. She knew that he had befriended the Potter boy and that being sorted into Gryffindor had filled his head with all sorts of ideas. She knew that parts of the wizarding world looked at their family, their history, and thought they were outdated, part of their past and not their future. They were accused of being relics, but it was only because they didn’t understand.
People like the Potters weren’t realistic. They didn’t see that the way they lived was under threat, that they needed to protect what was theirs with everything that they had. They didn’t understand the danger of diluting magical blood and mixing with lesser beings. She could hear their ideas, their words, their beliefs falling from her son’s lips and that hurt more than anything else.
All the time and energy she had spent into giving him the right upbringing, only to see it all come crashing down around her. She tried to reason with him, to make him see that they were wrong, but it was like she couldn’t get through to him. She wanted to make him see, to make him understand that the threat was real.
She took no pleasure in punishing him. It hurt her more than he would ever understand. It hurt her more than it hurt him, and she told him as much. When he cried, it burrowed under her skin, pressed so hard over her chest that she could barely breathe. That was why she silenced him.
But taking his voice wasn’t enough. Even when she did, he kept glowering at her, shooting defiant glares in her direction across the table. It gave her a headache.
She did everything that she could think of to bring him back into the fold, and yet it only made it worse. Everything she did, she did for the good of their family, and they all resented her for it.
Her husband stayed away. He shrunk away from his responsibilities like he had always shrunk away from everything that was difficult and left her to clean up the mess. His business trips grew longer and more frequent. Even when he was there he wasn’t really there, he moved through the house like a shadow, letting her carry the burden of their sons’ upbringing.
Regulus tried. She saw that he tried. He kept his head down and he worked hard, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. It would never be enough because it wasn’t supposed to be him.
It was always supposed to be Sirius.
Sirius was the brightest star in the sky, the one who was supposed to be her pride and joy. He was supposed to be the one who carried on the traditions of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, guiding the rest of them towards a brighter future. There was so much he was supposed to accomplish and she had done everything in her power to give him the tools to do just that, and the only thing he brought back to her was grief and heartbreak.
She had loved him, but he had never loved her back.
She could see that now. She had been blind for so long, but she could see it now. She could see that while she fought for their family, everyone else had given up. Where she had tried to keep everything together, the rest of her family was willing to stand by and watch as it fell apart.
Sirius thought that she hated him, but there was so much he didn’t understand. She wished he would have a child of his own one day, if only so that he would finally understand what it meant to love someone more than yourself. She needed him to understand what it felt like to love someone so much that you were willing to do everything in your power to save them.
That was all she had ever tried to do.
The only thing she had ever wanted was for Sirius to have a good life. She wanted to give him the world, everything that was rightfully his, and he had turned around and spit in her face.
He had taken every chance he got to embarrass her in front of her friends. Every chance he got to make fun of everything that she thought was important. He had taken every chance he got to ridicule her, and then he acted as if she was in the wrong when she rose to the bait he dangled in front of her.
She had never meant for it to happen.
She had never meant for it to happen but he made her so angry .
She had never meant for it to happen but he wouldn’t listen to her, wouldn’t stop when she told him, wouldn’t be quiet even when she threatened to take his voice.
Her husband had left, the same way he always did when things got difficult. Her younger son had melted into the shadows, making himself invisible as he always did when there was a fight.
He had stood in her house, her own flesh and blood, and he had told her he was ashamed of being a part of her family. Their family. He had looked her in the eyes, that infuriating smirk on his face, as if he thought he was so much better than them. Than her.
He had looked her in the face and told her he was leaving. That the Potters had offered to take him in. That he was walking away from everything that she had built for him.
Her own flesh and blood had looked her in the eye and told her he chose the Potters over her. That Euphemia Potter was more of a mother to him than she had ever been, when all she had ever done was try to protect him.
It wasn’t Euphemia Potter who had stayed up all night, rocking him back to sleep when he was a baby. It wasn’t Euphemia Potter who had nursed him back to health when he had fallen ill as a child. It wasn’t Euphemia Potter who had given him a roof over his head, food in his stomach and put clothes on his back.
Sirius was her child. She saw so much of herself in him. The same steel in his eyes, the curve of his mouth when he was displeased, how he carried himself in a room full of people. He was hers . It was her magical blood in his veins, her raven hair on his head, her flawless skin and sharp cheekbones. He was a Black through and through, no-one could ever look at him and think anything else. He was her son, and no-one could ever take him from her.
Afterwards, she didn’t even remember exactly what had happened.
She remembered Sirius on the floor, his eyes closed and cheeks wet with tears. Her ears were ringing, as if something had been very loud just moments before but the room was eerily quiet. She dropped her gaze to her hand which was still clutching her wand, her knuckles white.
“Mother.”
The voice had been so quiet, barely a whisper, and when she turned to look at her youngest son, his eyes had been wide. She could see the naked fear reflected back at her and it made her sick.
She had told the house-elf to take Sirius to bed but when she went into his room the next morning he wasn’t there. She had turned the house upside down then, but he was nowhere to be found, and she knew that he had left.
He had done what everyone else had done and left her alone to clean up the mess, to pick up the pieces, to glue together something that was irreparably broken.
She had gone to the Potters, threatened them within an inch of their lives, but she hadn’t managed to get through their wards. In that moment she would have begged, and Walburga Black never begged, if she had thought it would make a difference.
In the end, all she could do was go back home. Alone.
She had always wanted to have a son. In the end she got two, but that hadn’t mattered.
Regardless of what he thought, she had always loved him. She had never done anything but love him, and yet it hadn’t been enough. She saw that now.
She ran her fingers across the tapestry one last time before pulling out her wand.
He was going to come back.
He wasn’t going to come back.
He was never going to come back.
Her hand didn’t shake as she lifted it, pointing the tip of it against the portrait of her eldest son.
She had always wanted to have a son.
He wasn’t going to come back.
After everything she had done, he had still turned his back on her.
He had walked away from their family. From the world that she had tried to give him. He had walked away from her.
Her head was clear, the fuzziness from earlier gone. Her hand didn’t shake.
The curse rolled off her tongue as easily as her own name.
She had always wanted to have a son.
Her heart cracked and burned with the thick threads of the tapestry.
She had always wanted to have a son.
She still had a son.
She still had a son and she was not going to make the same mistake twice.
She watched the flames lick across the tapestry until nothing remained of the portrait but a burnt hole where there had once been a face. The smell of smoke clung to the air around her.
She thought of grey eyes underneath a bed. Of flames that licked curtains. Of smoke billowing around them.
She had done everything she could. This was not her fault.
She had a son.
She cleared her throat, voice hoarse from weeks of disuse.
She had a son and it was time they reminded the world that the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black was not broken.
She had a son.
She slid her wand back into the sheath hidden in her dress, straightened her posture and turned her back against the tapestry.
She had a son.
“Regulus!”